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I'm not actually blaming Woke, for the record-- that's why I put that whole spiel about this NOT being a conspiracy. But I am convinced this is very much a supply issue, not a demand issue-- I stopped pirating music when spotify got easy and good enough to be a better deal... (well in point of fact I stopped when grooveshark got DMCA'd, but didn't feel the need to find an alternative given that spotify was just *there)-- and I'll stop pirating books when...
Okay, maybe you have a tiny point. TBH the cause is probably at least somewhat bidirectional. But while I acknowledge that I'm getting into bravery debate here... I feel like the impact of the pressures on men are dramatically underestimated compared to the impact of the pressures by men, when it comes to the publishing industry. (And maybe also in general but that is a way larger discussion that I have the time to have right now) As a baseline estimate, since we see much more comparable reading rates for younger vs older children...
ref-- https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/feb/22/teenage-boys-reading-books-research?CMP=share_btn_url
1.4x vs 1.8x
I would guess that at least half of those boys are "lost" because of an insufficient supply of books. If the proportion at age 14-16 was 1.6x, we would see ~11% of boys reading. That doesn't sound like much, but that's 10% more male readers! And we should expect that this effect is actually cumulative given decreased rates of reading with age. Given the relationship between reading ability, educational attainment, and professional success, this difference in reading ability likely has massive downstream effects on the total number of men making it through to elite positions. Correcting that deficit is the opposite of a "waste of time." We could have-- at minimum, at an estimate-- a minimum of 10% more male doctors, lawyers, and engineers just by making sure more male-oriented books are published and promoted. Even ignoring the negative effects of the disparity between male and female achievement, the absolute effects of so many missing elites is likely to be significant and negative.
(Unless you believe AI will solve everything, but that's a fully general argument for not caring about anything.)
Sorry, but for middle-grade and young-adult boys, this supply-side argument just isn't empirically true.
Scholastic is a behemoth juvenile-lit publisher who sends their direct-marketing book fliers home with schoolkids and hosts annual book fairs at elementary and middle schools all over the USA. Here is their catalog for ages 13+. Skim it and you'll see whole rafts of titles obviously trying to catch the interest of teen boys:
Maybe it's not your personal ideal Naruto/ MLP/ skills-progression/ harem-porn cocktail, but at this level there's no shortage of publishing executives asking what boys like (fighting, adventure, videogames, skills, gore, comedy) and desperately trying to give it to them. Meanwhile, based on what I see around me, the tween boys are off binging MrBeast brainrot and disturbing TikTok AI porn, have minimal attention spans, and will not be enticed to pick up a book by any number of explosions on the cover.
And before someone argues "sure, but all those boys' books are stupid, formulaic and terrible," well, the girls' books very much are, too.
Meanwhile, I miss when people of either sex read books for some reason other than pure embarrassing wish-fulfillment, jack-off material, or TV fandom. And when every book didn't need to have pictures.
The girls' books seem stupid, formulaic, and terrible in a way that appeals to girls' interests, in a way that boys' girls aren't. That's the interesting question here, why book publishers, despite their monetary incentives, seem immensely terrible at appealing to boys in a way that they aren't when it comes to appealing to girls. Why is it that they're publishing the kinds of stuff directed at boys that they are now and declaring that they've tried and just lack the ability to force boys to read, instead of analyzing whatever underlying assumptions and ideologies that are directing them towards making bad decisions when it comes to publishing books that are stupid, formulaic, and terrible in a way that appeals to boys, like they're successfully doing for girls now?
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IMO there's plenty of supply if you know where to look, frankly way more supply that any human could engage with in a thousand lifetimes, between the classics, modern web fiction, and non-traditional mediums (narrative indie games, graphic novels, visual novels etc). If the claim is more narrow that there's a supply issue within modern traditional publishing then I agree, but it seems like neither male producers nor male consumers as a whole are particularly interested in filling the gap, so it seems like a bit of a dead end. I'm not convinced that specifically lack of modern traditionally published books is why boys are reading less, when there's so much else available to read for those interested.
Those are some interesting stats, but I'm not convinced that less boys reading is causal to reduced male educational / professional success (although it does seem likely that there are other factors of modernity causal of both less reading and less success).
The era where every upper-middle class man received a traditional liberal arts education and was conversant in the classics is decades past; nowadays your doctor's favorite movie is the Avengers and your lawyer plays Fifa in the one hour free he has every week to unwind. The pressures behind competitive careers nowadays don't really align with developing literary taste; I've had much more interesting intellectual conversations with underemployed third-world internet anons compared to the vast majority of the magnet school strivers that I went to school with. I'm not convinced that more reading would lead to more men in elite positions at all.
The operative words in your post are
That is a very high barrier to entry, and one I think you are inches away from recognizing given your later comments about marvel doctors and fifa lawyers. Men have to take an active and concerted effort to find fiction written for them, much less high quality fiction. Goodreads has an abysmally shit book recommendation system and its top-lists are all voted on overwhelmingly by women. Fanfiction sites are full up on sludge written by middle schoolers and without deep knowledge of which fandoms to read and what tags to look for you will find yourself running into works that may initially seem compelling but invariably devolve into fluff/romance/angst slop. Royal road is... royal road.
In the meantime, women have booktok influencers and glistening werewolf abs on every supermarket shelf. Overabundance leads to interest leads to consumption leads to overabundance, in a virtuous cycle.
Yeah that's fair enough, I agree that booktok / romantasy slop is now aggressively marketed to women in a way that reading is no longer marketed to men.
Still, I'm not really convinced this is a problem per se; on an individual level there's plenty of avenues for men to read and write literature if they so desire, and on a societal level would we really be better off if the romantasy equivalent (Dungeon Crawler Carl?) was getting marketed aggressively to men?
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